Archive for July, 2010

As some of you may have noticed if you have visited the IAMSLIC website today, the name servers have been redirected so that http://www.iamslic.org now points to the new website. Because it can take a day or two for these changes to propagate worldwide, some of you may still be taken to the old website, but this should change over time. In the meantime, because many of the internal links in the new website still show the temporary dreamhosters.com address, here are some direct links to several of the key sections of the new website that you may wish to bookmark:

This is the title of a paper by P.A. Todd et al. in v.408 2010 of Marine Ecology Progress Series. The abstract of the paper is below.

Joe Wible
Hopkins Marine Station

ABSTRACT: Citing sources that do not support the assertion being made can misinform readers, per- petuate mistakes and deny credit to the researchers who should have been acknowledged. To quan- tify citation fidelity in marine biology, we retrieved 198 papers from 2 recent issues of 33 marine biol- ogy journals. From each paper we randomly selected 1 citation, recovered the source material, and evaluated its appropriateness. We discovered that the assertion was ‘clearly supported’ by the cita- tion in only 75.8% of cases, the support was ‘ambiguous’ in 10.6% of cases and the citation offered ‘no support’ to the original statement in 6.0% of cases. The remaining 7.6% of cases were classified as ‘empty’ (citations to secondary sources). We found no relationship between citation appropriate- ness and the position of the assertion in the paper, number of authors, number of references, article length and Journal Impact Factor. That 1 in 4 citations in marine biology should be viewed with scep- ticism is alarming and has important ramifications for both scholarship and bibliometrics.

The Stanford University Libraries invite applications and nominations for the Head Librarian of the Branner Earth Sciences Library. This is an Academic Staff appointment, rather than a faculty-tenured position. Applicants should apply via: http://jobs.stanford.edu/find_a_job.html. Please supply a cover letter, a complete statement of qualifications, a full resume of including education and relevant experience, and the names and addresses of three references with knowledge of one’s professional qualifications for this position.

Stanford University’s School of Earth Sciences focuses on the study of the planet Earth – “its mantle and crust, atmosphere, climate, oceans, land and water systems, and its resources.” The School is actively pursuing new roles in research and education in Earth, energy and environmental sciences. If you are a subject specialist in environmental sciences and research, consider joining a cutting edge team of science and engineering librarians during this exciting time of change and challenges as we create dynamic science libraries for the 21st century.

The Libraries seek a candidate who will develop and manage collections in support of the four departments and two programs in the School of Earth Sciences: Geological & Environmental Sciences, Geophysics, Energy Resources Engineering, and Environmental Earth System Science as well as the Earth Systems Program and the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program on Environment and Resources (E-IPER).
The Head Librarian is responsible for the day to day operations of the Branner Earth Sciences Library and oversees 2.25 FTE Library Specialists and 1.0 FTE student workers. The Librarian will work closely with the Assistant Director of Cartographic, Geospatial and Scientific Data & Services who oversees the Branner Library Map Collections and Geospatial Resources. S/he is a member of the Science and Engineering Resource Group (SERG) and participates actively in the Group’s programs. SERG’s focus is to remake the traditional science libraries into more responsive, dynamic, and flexible information centers. This is being carried out through a series of initiatives in which the Earth Sciences Librarian will be an integral part. Innovative ideas and an ability to adapt to and create change are highly valued skills for the person in this position. In short, the Librarian for Earth Sciences will be an energetic and flexible colleague who is looking towards the futu! re and wants to be an integral part of creating a new model of digital librarianship.

The IAMSLIC Website and Communications Committee has been working jointly with the EURASLIC Web Committee since the past conference in Belgium to investigate alternatives for the hosting platform for our various web services and resources. Last week, the IAMSLIC Executive Board approved our proposal to relocate the IAMSLIC website to a commercial hosting service rather than purchasing a new server to replace the obsolete server that has been hosted by the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. Since then, Sally Taylor and I have been working to replicate all of the IAMSLIC website and blog content on the new host platform and we have completed that work. In fact, this is the first posting from the new IAMSLIC blog to be broadcast to the IAMSLIC Discussion List.

We anticipate that the Internet address (www.iamslic.org) for the website will be redirected to the new host starting on Tuesday or Wednesday next week, 13 or 14 July, 2010. Once that occurs, I will send out a followup message with the specific URL addresses of the main IAMSLIC website, the News & Events blog, the 2010 conference website, etc. In the meantime, you may preview the new website at its temporary address:
http://iamslic.dreamhosters.com

﻿In July of each year, I collate and summarize the resource sharing statistics from the IAMSLIC Distributed Library project. 2009/10 represents the eighth complete year of the resource sharing program. A total of 4977 requests were submitted during 2009/10, the highest volume of activity recorded to date and an increase of 15% over 2008/09. A total of 28,176 requests have been submitted via the system since its inception in 2002.

The resource sharing program continues to be broadly international in scope, with 74 different IAMSLIC lending libraries in 23 countries receiving borrowing requests from 119 IAMSLIC libraries in 42 countries, very similar to previous year’s numbers. 35 (47%) of those 74 lending libraries are in the United States and they received 60.1% of the total requests, while Mexico, Australia, Canada and Germany collectively received 29.5% of the borrowing requests.

The Hatfield Marine Science Center of Oregon State University (U.S.) was the top lending library again this year, followed by the Alfred Wegener Institut in Bremerhaven (Germany), the University of Hawaii (U.S.), the Bedford Institute of Oceanography (Canada), and Hopkins Marine Station (U.S.).

There were no significant shifts from the past year in the proportions of lending and borrowing across the Regional Groups. The Latin American region continues to make active use of the resource sharing program while contributing a substantial amount of lending in return, including an significant percentage of requests filled within the region. EURASLIC still conducts much of its regional interlibrary loan activity via its discussion list, so the number of transactions via the Distributed Library does not reflect the full volume of resource sharing in the region, however a growing number of EURASLIC libraries are active users of the system. The volume of activity remains low in Africa and moderate in the Pacific region.

The complete set of data is available on the Distributed Library website via the Resource Sharing Statistics link at http://library.csumb.edu/iamslic/ill/. It includes a spreadsheet for each year that offers charts and additional analysis of lending and borrowing patterns. I encourage you to look at the 2009/10 numbers and will be glad to answer any questions you may have about the data.

Last summer Karen Cooper took on the task of redesigning the Miller Library web pages using Drupal. Drupal is an open source content management system the Stanford libraries have adopted. There were a few pages that were complicated to move, so it took a while to get the technical support required to complete that last step. This was finally done this spring, and as of now we are live with the Drupal pages. Our old pages are still there, but they are not being updated and will not be around for long. If you have any links to the Miller Library pages, be sure to update your URL(s). The new home page is at http://lib.stanford.edu/miller-library-marine-biology.